Apple's New Lottery System Gives Everyone an Equal Shot at Getting Into WWDC

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Apple's New Lottery System Gives Everyone an Equal Shot at Getting Into WWDC

Apple is holding WWDC June 2nd this year.

Image: Apple

Apple announced that its annual, five-day Worldwide Developer conference (WWDC) will kick off June 2nd this year. And following the model that other large conferences like Google I/O have set, tickets will now be doled out randomly, rather than first-come, first-serve. It's a bold change, and a welcome one.

Over the past few years, demand for tickets for Apple's developer conference has grown to epic proportions, leaving many longtime attendees sitting at home, sullenly watching conference proceedings on Apple's website, or attending alternative, unofficial conference sessions held in the Bay Area. While plenty of devs still won't be able to attend with the random ticket dispersement, the change at least gives them an equal chance of snagging one of the coveted $1,600 spots.

"WWDC is the highlight event of the Apple community, so there is a lot of interest in gaining entry to the conference," Steven Yarger, Trulia's head of mobile told Wired. Yarger says the move to random tickets is "great news" since the previous distribution system seemed unreliable. "The reality is that with WWDC being such a hot ticket, there will always be people who don’t get a ticket and are unhappy – which is a good problem for Apple to have since so many developers want to attend their conference."

Up until this year, Apple announced (often with little to no notice) when tickets would go on sale. Developers would then have to hustle to get in the queue and sign up before eager attendees snapped up the show's 5,000 available spots. In 2012, the surprise 5:30am ticket release left many west coast developers puzzled, angry, and ticket-less. In 2010, tickets took 8 days to sell out. In 2011, it took less than 12 hours. Both last year and the year before, tickets sold out in just under two hours.

At WWDC, developers can choose from 100 technical sessions to attend, have access to over 1,000 Apple engineers, and take part in hands-on labs to help debug their apps. It's a level of access you can't get anywhere else, and as such, it can be an invaluable experience.

There's no way to appease everyone, but this year's switch to randomly chosen attendees should at least give developers, no matter their education, experience level, or success, equal footing to attend Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference this year.